[kobold at debian.org: The future of Zope{2, 3} and Plone in Debian and Ubuntu]

[Erik Rose]

I'm sad to see Plone support go, as I have a lot of reservations about  
how Plone is distributed these days.

> The suggested upstream way to install plone, for example, is the  
> unified
> installer. ZTK developers suggest the use of zc.buildout. These
> tools create an isolated environment where it is possible to develop  
> and
> run your software with a very limited interactions with the rest of  
> the
> system.

Buildout is really a development tool and not universally lauded as a  
deployment solution (though it's ubiquitous right now simply because  
it's the only thing that works). It suffers many reliability issues in  
both its design and its execution that make it unsuitable for our  
production environments, and it routinely confounds new users with the  
very build system concept, with its config syntax, and with its opaque  
modes of failure. Its goal of isolation from the base system is also  
both a strength and weakness: at some point, it either has to admit a  
dependency on system libraries (e.g. PIL) or else become a (less  
mature) package management system in its own right. By bundling zipped  
copies of the necessary packages and not exposing buildout's config  
file during installation, Steve McMahon has done an incredible job  
making the Unified Installer approachable and reliable for initial  
installs, but one is still left with raw buildout for updates and  
managing third-party add-ons.

For years, I've enjoyed and admired your packages as a refreshingly  
mature alternative. Leveraging Debian's superior QA and aptitude's  
fail-safety, they have been the most dependable solution for the  
unattended deployments that comprise WebLion's Plone hosting service.  
We will certainly miss your excellent work!

> Zope 2 and Plone are obviously related, so the future of one of the  
> two
> influences the other one.
>
> The main problem for Zope2 is that the current stable upstream branch
> (2.12) still requires pthon2.4.

Actually not; it works in 2.5 and 2.6. 2.4 is unsupported by 2.12,  
though it "should work". http://docs.zope.org/zope2/releases/2.12/WHATSNEW.html#support-for-newer-python-versions

> This is not acceptable in Debian and
> Ubuntu, and Zope 2 is right now the only stopper for the removal of
> python2.4 from both Debian and Ubuntu.
>
> Even worse, the current stable Plone releases requires Zope 2.10,  
> which we
> suppose will never support anything but python2.4 in the foreseeable
> future. The new major upstream branch (Plone 4) is still far from  
> being released, which means
> that the only way to support Plone and Zope 2.x in Debian and Ubuntu  
> is to
> keep python2.4 in the distribution.

Were you aware that we've renumbered the releases and inserted a less  
ambitious Plone 4, which should be in beta by the end of the year? It  
will run on (and require) Zope 2.12. Plone is finally joining the  
modern Python world. :-)

Best,
Erik